Wireless local area networks (WLANs) such as Large-Scale Dense Networks (LSDNs) are becoming prevalent in many environments such as in office buildings, schools, factory floors, and the like. In a typical Institute of Electrical Electronic Engineer (IEEE) 802.11x standard (i.e. 802.11a, 802.11b, and so forth, herein, simply 802.11) wireless network, an access point (AP), which may be any type of electronic or computing device such as a workstation, a router, or a gateway, acts as an interface for one or more wireless devices (i.e., stations (STAs)) to a wired network (e.g., LAN). In LSDN networks, a large number of access points (AP) are often packed closely together servicing many clients or stations (STAs) in a relatively confined area. Each AP/STAs group forms a wireless network cell (herein “cell”), which in such a dense environment, typically overlap other cells. Because these cells tend to overlap in heavily dense environments, signals transmitted within a cell will typically experience interference from signals generated from nodes belonging to other cells (note that for purposes of this description, a node may be an access point or a client or station). This is in part because WLAN was originally designed for situations whereby a single access point (AP) would service a few stations (STA) in a relatively isolated environment. Further, for the 802.11b/g standards (2.4 GHz band), for example, only three non-overlapping channels are available for WLAN networks or devices (i.e., access points or stations). Thus, in high density environments where there are many cells closely located to each other, adjacent overlapping cells will often be using the same channels that may cause signals generated in one cell to substantially interfere with communication between nodes of another cell.
The current solution to the interference problem is to fine-tune (typically reduce) the transmission power of each of the nodes (e.g., access point or station) within a cell so that the transmissions generated by the access point and/or the stations of one cell (a cell will typically include one station and a plurality of stations) will minimally interfere with the communication operations in other nearby cells.